Bianca space is needed for two ongoing projects-
1) Effects of human cytomegalovirus infection in immunocompetent forebrain organoids Congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infections are a significant contributor to neurological sequelae including cognitive defects and increased risk for neuropsychiatric disorders. We established an organoid model containing microglia to study neurodevelopment under CMV-infection and investigate cell-type specific pathomechanisms We have the data from Single-cell RNA-sequencing of CMV-infected patient derived organoids. 4 sample types with ctrl, ctrl + drug, virus, virus + drug.
We will run standard raw scRNASeq analysis via cellranger followed by downstream analysis tasks for celltype annotation, differential expression, compositional variation, RNA velocity / trajectory analysis and probably deconvolution (based on previous analysis if needed)
2) Evolution of Schizophrenia genetic risk from ancestral populations To analyze ancient DNA data from public repos to understand how the risk of Schizophrenia (SCZ) was evolved into modern day populations through time from Mesolithic, bronze age to medieval age. We use GWAS, polygeneic risk scores and other haplotype based ancestry prediction tools to quantify the evolutionary disease risk and to determine which population led to higher SCZ risk in Sweden. Although the ancient DNA samples are public domain and not sensitive, the projects intends to analyse SCZ patient samples from KaSP project and / or UK Biobank to deconvolute their ancestry composition and associated SCZ risk contribution.